Professor Brian Cox, a theoretical physicist from the United Kingdom is an interesting combination of Scientist and Entertainer. The BBC broadcasted an engaging show in which Cox explains quantum theory to an audience of celebrities during a "Night with the Stars."

He makes a very strong case for physics in this about one hour long demonstration...

This very convincing presentation just leaves out the question for the 'Why' and I will explore this now a bit more.

Let me introduce first a very basic law in physics that you might have heard about, and that you have certainly experienced, and that is the law of the warm beer.

OK, it might not be officially called by that name, but this is how we experience it. If you are not a beer drinker you might refer to this law as the "law of the melting ice cream." If we try to more official we would call it the law of increasing entropy.

If you look up entropy in the dictionary you will find several definitions but for our purpose it is enough to say that entropy is a measurement for randomness. If something is very orderly and highly structured its entropy is low but if we have a chaos of totally randomly distributed particles and 'things' we call this high entropy.

This physical law calling for an every increasing entropy now means that entropy in a closed system never decreases but always increases, meaning that things are getting more and more random or chaotic.

Looking for confirmation for this law, by observing beer and ice-cream, we notice the law in action: we have a room temperature of maybe 90 degrees and ice-cream or beer of much lower temperature when they are first brought into the room. There is order and structure - warm here - cold there. Now we exit the room and leave beer and ice cream alone. When we come back after a while we find that now beer, ice-cream and room have the same temperature. Order and structure were dissolved and thus entropy increased.

We can observe this for different subjects in very different time frames. While with our ice-cream and beer example we have to wait a few hours to notice the increase in entropy, we have to deal with much longer time frames when looking at examples like the pyramids. They started out as perfect structures but over the last few millennia they started to decay taking on, more and more, the characteristic of the surrounding desert, thus reducing order and increasing entropy.

There is one very interesting conclusion we can draw, based on the fact that we are still around - the fact that the universe has not dissolved into total chaos and randomity is considered to prove that the universe has existed for only a limited time. Had it existed for a very long time, like for example eternity, there would have been enough time for all matter to reach complete random distribution, evenly distributed matter throughout the universe with an equal temperature everywhere - no more structure, and thus no more you and me.

That is if there is only physics. But, remember, that there have been instances in the past where a new quality entered the picture that changed the whole view of te world - like the discovery of nuclear fusion fueling the sun instead of coal (see: Science is broken - somewhat).

Could it be that there might be something beside the physics which would then also change the view of the world? First we have to look if there is any indication that the idea of ever increasing entropy might not describe the complete truth. Sure, the abandoned amusement park will decay and eventually disappear, given enough time. And this big old tree trunk in the forest, lying on the ground, will eventually turn into just another bit of the soil it was resting on after being struck by lightning. Increasing entropy is definitely at work.

But the questions looking for answers are, how did the amusement park get there in the first place and how is it possible for this big old tree to be there when it was struck by lightning?

And have you ever seen a baby been born and growing into an adult? That all seems to violate the basic laws of ever-increasing entropy. So we have a few obvious observations which do not fit the currently accepted theory of the workings of the universe. Yes, deep in the guts of the leading edge of theoretical physics there exist ideas on how this could still work with, looking at physics only. But these attempts remind me of another time when the established view of the universe was challenged by free minds that did not want to just ignore observations that did not quite fit. That was the time just before Galileo Galilei. Before his heretic postulate that the sun and not the earth was the center of the universe, astronomers had observed and recorded the path of the heavenly bodies and tried to make sense of them. Some of the lights in the sky were following rather simple paths like circular arcs (we know now that those were other stars), but others follow rather strange paths which involve even sometimes reversing their direction (today we know those objects in the sky were other planets of our solar system).

The math to describe those paths turned out to be very complicated. When the model was corrected to the solar centric (sun in the center) model we use today, the math became much simpler.

With the leading edge of today's theoretical physics we might be facing a similar dilemma. The math is very complicated, only understood by very few with many years of exposure to the most esoteric branches of science. Maybe we are in need for a new Galileo Galilei to bring some new ideas to make science understandable to many again.

Let us, for the moment, adopt the premise that the physical laws are not the only laws there are, that there is another quality governing the universe together with physics. We don't have to look very far to find this idea manifested - it is the Eastern view of the two competing and complementing qualities of Yin and Yang.

When I first studied this idea I was introduced to Yin and Yang as the Expanding and the Contracting. An apple, for example with its solid form is much more yang than a lettuce with its out-reaching and expanding features. Let us go back to the ever increasing entropy of physics. Doesn't this phenomenon have an expanding, yin, quality? Expecially if compared with the phenomenon of a growing tree for which substances from all over have to be collected and compressed and combined into a solid structure like a trunk. If entropy is yin, then the constructing phenomenon of growing is certainly yang.

If the yin-yang principle has any validity - and from many observable phenomena it appears so - and if physics is the yin quality of the universe, then there must be this other quality - yang - around here somewhere.

I am very strongly tempted to chose 'life-force' as that yang-quality making up the universe. While the increasing entropy of physics postulated the heat-death of the universe, we observe everywhere the constructing quality of life.

Currently this life force is not considered part of physics, instead it is considered to be separate and opposite of t and called meta-phyics; but just as the once separate particle and wave nature of phenomena was combined into the current quantum-nature of the world, so can we assume that at one point physics will embrace life-force an we will have a better picture of the world - one that describes it more completely.

First we take a look at the biological aspect, which means we primarily look how our body works. The building block of all known living organisms is the cell and a human body has somewhere in the range of 10 to 100 trillion of those. The exact number is unknown and this fact should give us much fodder to think. How can we not know what cells constitute us, if this body is something that we commonly consider to be the "I"? The reason for this uncertainty is simply that at every moment millions, if not billion cells die and others come into existence through the division of other cells.

In fact, the body does not appear to be a closely defined collection of material. We add substance to our body by eating, these materials are processed and supply the material for cells to grow and divide. Other cells that have reached the end of their duty cycle are washed out of the body and left behind, some of this material is flushed down the toilet but another part is just spread into the environment - sweat, dandruff, hair, dead skin cells are the reason that we have to vacuum or sweep, and have to wash these left-overs out of our clothes.

The idea about food that many of us have is simply not correct. We do not just put some material into our body and it comes out after some energy has been extracted, instead much of the material is built into our body for a while, does its job for some period of time and is then released. The following picture of our body is much more correct: it is some space, or volume, moving through life, continuously feeding new material into it as it moves through it, and at the same time leaving the same amount as a cloud behind. If we add to this the fact that we are exchanging a huge amount of material with the environment in the form of the air we breathe, it becomes clear that the idea that our body is a clearly defined object that we can identify with, is simply not correct.

Our body is in constant exchange with it's environment and it has been calculated once that there are at least a few atoms or molecules in our body that have been in Jesus's body a few thousand years ago. Also, calculating the amount of material that enters and leaves out body every day, we come to the result that every seven years we have a completely new body. The body you have today consists of nearly 100% different atoms than the ones you had seven years ago. This rate of renewal is even faster for the soft tissues of your body as for example your heart - you heart today is a different one than the one you had two to three years ago.

Since science learned about DNA, at least we know that our essence is carried in these strands of molecules that each of our cells contains and which gives them the ability to apparently maintain our body's integrity - so that we know who we are.

Unfortunately for that point of view we now have to look for the guests we carry with us. Most of us have learned in school that there are beneficial bacteria in our digestive tract helping us to digest the food we eat. From these classes we probably kept this image in our mind of a few of those symbionts living with us. But this picture is not quite right, unfortunately. Foreign cells living in and on our body outnumber our own cells by a very high number - possibly in the range of ten to one!

The idea of our body being that one stable thing that allows us to identify ourselves gets weaker and weaker, if in this confined space that IS our body only ten percent actually carries our own DNA, and the rest are just other entities that life in harmony with our own cells but are definitely not the "I".

Let's summarize what your body actually is: it is a particularly shaped space that is filled to a big degree with water, but also contains cells, ten percent of which I consider my own because they contain my own DNA. These cells are constantly duplicating themselves, live for a little while, then die and will be eventually expelled.

Beyond this biological view, we then have to take the physical view and understand that the molecules and atoms these cells are built from, are mostly empty space with a few vibrating energy strings - possibly curled up in the very small dimensions number 4 to 10 - in the middle.

This is getting pretty wild, yes?

The question now becomes, how these cells - foreign and our own - know where to go and what role to fulfill.

Science has not, as far as this author can discern, provided an answer. Thus we have to move into the area of speculative science. Could it be that the behavior is similar to that on the very smallest scale - the strings of string theory? There we have vibrating energy fields of the smallest size creating, or manifesting, all the particles we know from particle physics, all depending on the frequency of this vibration. Just as the vibration of the strings open up a space that then contains the manifestation of a quark, for example, could it be that there is some energy or vibration that creates, or open up, the space that is then filled with the matter that we consider our body?

One observation of an instant healing did make this theory plausible. This author learned of a very lively, big dog, a Collie, running around and having the best time, until, after one poorly executed jump, caming down, hitting the ground the wrong way. She was lying there very still with one limb very much out of position. The owner told me later that he already saw in his mind all the trouble of getting his dog to the veterinarian, possible surgery and all the cost involved. But the dog, all of a sudden, shook her whole body violently as if getting everything back into place and ran off as if nothing had happened. Apparently this energy field, which was the dog, knew where everything was supposed to be and instantly shook everything into its proper place.

In pursuing the question what the characteristic of this energy field might be, we will have to move deeper into the speculative domain, when we explore different types of universes.